End of the Road (25 page)

Edith smiled. “Who, the banjo man? He ain’t
that amazing.”

“
Amazing ain’t the half of
it. That feller is divine.”

Edith studied her for a moment, staring into
Hilda’s face, squinting as if looking deep into a fire. Then she
began to laugh. “You got to be kidding.”

“
Don’t you say a goddamn
thing, Edith May, or I swear I’ll beat you till you
scream.”

Edith kept laughing. Hilda raised a hand for
another round of whiskey and the two women sat glaring and
snickering respectively until the band returned.

The trio came out again and took their
places beneath the two dim stage lights and began once more to
play. Almost immediately Hilda was caught up and taken away again,
her spirits lifted and floating upon the bubbling rhapsody of a
“Foggy Mountain Breakdown” as if she were being buoyed by a cloud.
She’d heard the song a million times before, a thousand million,
but never like this.

His hands moved in a blur, and the picks on
his fingertips were silver streaks sparking hypnotically beneath
those two lights suspended above him as if the sun and moon had
sent surrogates to pay tribute and to watch him play. No one had
ever been so beautiful as him, of this Hilda was sure, and a need
for him began to fill her like grain pouring into a bloating gunny
sack, swelling her and threatening to burst her at the seams. She
nearly couldn’t take it, it swelled so much inside.

“
I got to meet that
feller,” she said, leaning across the table to Edith. “I just got
to.”

“
So go and meet him
then.”

“
I can’t just go up to him
like I was some child in heat.”

Edith shook her head and laughed again.

Hilda spat, this time with perfect accuracy.
“Goddamn it, Edith, you’re supposed to be my friend.”

“
Well, what am I gonna do?
Go and do it for you? ‘Say Mister, you see my friend over there
frog-eyeing the hell out of you? She wants to know if you’ll come
buy her a drink.’” Edith wrinkled up her face like as if she’d just
sucked a lime. “Come on, now. We ain’t fifteen no more.”

Hilda leaned back and drew in a long breath.
The chair creaked and groaned beneath her weight. Edith was right.
She had to do it herself. She was acting like a silly girl. She
spat again, and got up and went to the bathroom to fix herself
up.

Standing before the mirror she stared at her
reflection, studied the lines of her face in ways she hadn’t done
since Eljin died nearly thirty years ago, studied herself as a
woman. The pretty blue eyes Eljin had loved so much were still blue
enough. Lilac blue, he told her once. She’d laughed and had to tell
him Lilacs weren’t blue. He’d laughed too. Then he kissed her and
brought her Lilacs every anniversary for eleven years. Nobody
brought her Lilacs anymore. And nobody kissed her. She grunted and
spat into the sink.

“
Shit.”

She pushed a strand of coarse gray hair off
her broad forehead and tucked it behind her ear. Had that many
years gone by? She wished she had some makeup or something, not
that she’d ever been much good putting that stuff on.

She stepped back and straightened her dress.
Once white with a busy floral print, it was mostly faded to gray
now, the flowers long since past the springtime brilliance of
younger days. Right dingy, she figured. Still, she pulled it down,
straightening it round her thick hips and lining up the front to
best amplify her titanic bosom. She stared at herself and spat
again. Hope he likes big women.

She returned to her seat across from Edith.
“Well, how do I look?”

“
Same as when you went
in.”

Hilda spat again.

They sat and watched the band for another
half hour, Hilda getting more and more nervous as the minutes went
by. By the time the band stopped, Hilda was so agitated that her
stomach made noise: one long growl, traversing the winding innards
buried beneath the layer of gravy-grown belly fat, rumbled loud
enough for Edith to hear from across the table and despite the low
murmur of the modest crowd.

Hilda spat.

“
Well,” said Edith. “There
he is at the bar. You gonna go talk to him or what?”

“
Shit.”

Edith laughed. “You’re a piece of work, you
know that?”

Hilda ran her fingers down the corners of
her mouth as if stroking a beard. “I’m fixin’ too. Just figuring
what I’m gonna say.”

“
Start with ‘hello’ and
maybe ‘your music is great,’ see where that gets you.”

Hilda spat again.

“
You sure I look
alright?”

“
You look fine. Go
already.”

Hilda worked the wad of Red Man in her cheek
furiously with her molars, grinding juice out of it like a
chewed-on oil can. She sent another jet of brown through the
yawning brass mouth of the spittoon. “I can’t do it.”

Edith watched her for a time, her jaw moving
back and forth, lips pursed and her left eye squinting some. Wasn’t
much she could say.

The house band came on to replace the banjo
man and his group. Hilda slumped in her chair pushing a packet of
sugar around the table with a thick forefinger.

Every so often she’d look up and watch the
banjo man visiting with patrons at the bar or bobbing to the sounds
of the local house band. She thought it was noble and beautiful
that a man so capable of magic like he was could appreciate the
sounds of these homegrown boys. Showed his makings on the inside.
Genuine.

She spat and went back to pushing the sugar
packet around.

When the house band took its first break,
Anders Jackson, a great hulk of a man, a steer wrestler and the
guitar player for the local group, headed for the bar, moving
through the sparse crowd with too wide smiles and touching
frequently the wide black hat he wore, making sure it was pressed
down tight and the secret of an encroaching bald spot only his to
keep. He ordered a bottle and commenced to drinking heavily.

Hilda watched Anders settle in to his bottle
at the bar. Having taught him when he was in third grade, she’d
known then what kind of man he’d grow up to be. She watched him
eyeballing the elegant banjo man with jealousy in his eyes. Hilda
shook her head and, with a glance at Edith, pointed with her
chin.

Edith saw the inevitable shaping up too, and
she sighed in that exasperated way people do when some things can’t
be helped.

Anders took the bottle with him back onstage
and nursed it steadily over the course of the band’s next set,
tilting it up between songs and chugging it while the two dim stage
lights reflected off the glass and the bubbles rose noisily inside,
the gurgling broadcast over the microphone and garnering chuckles
from the crowd. Some of them anyway. By the time the band’s next
break came, Anders was wobbling some.

He put the empty bottle back on the bar and
ordered another. He was really eyeballing the banjo man this time.
Even the banjo man noticed it and tried to look away, which of
course pulled Anders to him like the scent of chickens draws a
fox.

“
What you looking at banjo
man?” Anders said in a voice that was thick with whiskey and
misshapen with a snarl.

The banjo man, unable to ignore the brute
before him, was forced to look up. Hilda could tell he was
intimidated as hell. Anders leaned over him and ground him down
with his gaze, causing him to wilt like a flower under an evil
heat.

Hilda felt heat rising of her own. Edith
reached a hand out and tried to hold her back. “No,” she said, but
she was too late.

The sound of Hilda’s chair hitting the wall
and tumbling to the floor made both Anders and the banjo man look
toward her. She stormed across the room and grabbed Anders by the
shirt front, spinning him to face her and shoving his back against
the bar. “Anders Jackson, if you don’t stop right goddamn now I
will beat you till you bleed. You hear me, boy?”

Ander’s eyes went wide. Fury flared in his
face and his body swelled with ignited rage.

But somehow Hilda swelled more. She gripped
him tight, his shirt wadding and popping a button in the vice of
her powerful fist. She leaned into him, her eyes narrow and
earnest, and she pinned him with a look of such wrath that his
mouth fell open even as he tried to find the nerve to strike.

“
Do it,” she said, eyes
narrow as she pushed her face forward right at him. “Do
it!”

He seemed to teeter, a great boulder
wobbling on the brink of some terrible fall. But he settled back on
his heels, glaring at her with hatred before pushing past her and
out of the bar with a “Fuck you” for everyone in the room.

A few moments passed in hushed silence, but
finally the Busted Jug’s quiet clamor returned to normal again.
Hilda turned to face the banjo man. At least she was up here
now.

But she could see his shame. It blossomed
red on his face like an opening rose of self-reproach, the dawning
recognition of a man whose masculinity is lost. She saw it and
watched it spread all the way to his ears, saw it and realized with
horror what she had done.

“
No, no,” she started to
say, and her words clamored for grip. Embarrassment filled him,
drooped him at the shoulders and the mouth like a tent that’s lost
its poles. He mumbled something, faked a smile, limp and flitting,
then left through the same door Anders had, leaving her to turn and
watch him go. She followed him with her eyes all the way out the
door, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps, attempts to fill
lungs that were flooding with helplessness instead. How could she
be so stupid?

When the door closed behind the banjo man,
she turned towards the wall, shaking, her whole body one great
tremor rising. She saw the jukebox sitting there, shining and
blinking its stupid lights, filled with mockery and its stacks of
musical ghosts. She kicked it in. Kicked in the whole front of that
juke box with a heavy booted foot, her leg pumping into it like a
diesel piston and sending bits of shattered plastic and paint chips
skittering across the floor. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she yelled, and
kept yelling until her rage finally turned to acid tears and the
acceptance of a lonely truth.

The other patrons could only stand and
watch. Even Edith did not dare to intervene.

Eventually Hilda stopped kicking and stood
staring blankly at the wall again, fighting for calm. She closed
her eyes and willed the tears to stop. Once they had, she wiped
them from her cheeks with the backs of her hands.

“
Fuck it,” she said. Then
she went away.

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About the
author:

John Daulton is a novelist
best known for his bestselling science fiction and fantasy
series
The Galactic
Mage
, but he does, from time to time, make
forays into literary fiction and short stories like he has done
with “Hilda’s Song.” For more information or to find his other
work, visit his website at
http://DaultonBooks.com
.

Chapter 24

Sinners in Church

By Kathleen Steed

Bert, Jerald and Chuck tried to stay awake
through the service. Chuck told them they would get free food when
it was over and the house across the street sold marijuana after
church. Besides he wanted them to get a look at the gold cross. The
pastor was slamming his fist on the wooden podium where he stood to
preach.

“
Give it up! God knows what
you are thinking. He knows what you are planning.”

Bert was startled. It was okay if God knew
what they were going to do. God wasn’t going to come all the way
down to Earth for the likes of them. What was worrying Bert was how
the pastor found out about their plans?

He whispered to Jerald, “How did he find
out?”

“
What? God? How stupid are
you?” Jerald whispered back.

“
Not God. That freaking
pastor.”

Chuck leaned over and gave Bert a look and
kind of growled at him softly.

Chuck and his friends were sixteen years
old. Chuck wore nice clothes and kept his hair cut because his
father demanded it. The other two looked like they’d worn their
jeans and t-shirts to bed the night before. Jerald had pink
highlights in his unwashed hair. Bert’s hair hung down unevenly
over his ears. The group started smoking pot in middle school.
There was a group of old spinsters sitting in front of them. One
with very curly gray hair turned to give the boys a frown. They sat
back and got quiet. She turned back to listen to the sermon. They
sang the last hymn and the service was over. The boys avoided the
pastor and snuck down the stairs to the fellowship hall for the
free food. They got a paper plate and filled it with snacks and
tiny sandwiches. Huddled together in a corner they smiled and
nodded at anyone who said hello to them. Chuck was the son of the
Sunday school superintendent. After a bit a young black man who was
smiling and talking with everyone seated in the fellowship hall put
his jacket on and left saying ‘see you next week’ to everyone.

Chuck made sure his parents were engaged in
conversation and the boys snuck out of the church quietly. They met
the young black man across the street and handed him fifty bucks.
They took their bag of weed and crossed back over to hide behind
the parsonage where the furnace oil tank was located. They rolled a
joint and each took a hit. They passed the joint around until it
was consumed.

“
You guys know the pastor
figured out our plan?” said Bert.

“
You ass. He don’t know
nothing,” said Jerald.